Timing is absolutely everything! And if you are thinking of selling your home, using a good agent to help you price and select the best time to list your home is crucial to getting the most money for your home. Which is all what we want, correct?

Now that the peak selling season is over, I often hear people say, "we plan to take it off the market and try to sell again next spring. We think we will be able to sell for the highest price in the spring."

When you hear people say this, please send them to me and let me see if the market data reflects this or not. I find it is often not the case. Yes, the spring and summer is when the largest amount of homes sell, yet it is not always for the highest dollar amount. Surprised?

Take Twin Creeks in Cedar Park, TX for instance:

Here are the number of homes that sold and average sold price for each Quarter of 2016:

Q1 - $531,214 (7 Homes)

Q2 - $475,141 (17 Homes)

Q3 - $428,506 (8 Homes)

Q4 - $526,940 (10 Homes)

Do you see this? Homes that sold in the 4th Quarter of 2016 in Twin Creeks sold for more than $50K higher than homes in the 2nd Quarter and it only increased in Q1! So why would you wait till next year to put your home on the market if you need to sell it now?

And in case you need more reasons to consider selling now. I often hear that families don't want to have their home on the market during the holidays. Let's reframe this now. Buyers looking during the holidays are only serious buyers. You are going to have less showings and interruption for the most part. AND don't forget the news of rising interest rates. When the rates rise a point, that effects buying power by 10% for most buyers, ouch! AND lastly, you will be up against less competition.

If you are going to wait till next year to list your home, when is the best time to put your home one the market? Depending on the market, in my opinion, if you wait till spring you may miss the boat.

Take a look at the graph below provided by Gracy Title. This is the number of homes sales for 2013-2017 for the Austin area:

You can see how homes sales historically start to pick up speed in March. This means that those homes went under contract in February. So you can see that if you wait till spring, you may miss a good time to be on the market (and be up against less competition) and enjoy the first up tick in activity.

Thank you for reading! I love this job and love helping people succeed when it comes to their real estate decisions to buy, sell or invest. Please call me if you have any questions or would like to further discuss timing for the sale of your home.

My name is Laura Ivy Blessing and I blog about the Austin area known and lesser known happenings with a splash of real estate savvy for today's buyers and sellers. blessing@kw.com 512-789-5087